D&D 4E Anyone playing 4e at the moment?

[AbdulAlhazred]

I made a martial practice that allowed one to basically split the mountain ... patterned after the Passwall ritual with advantages and disadvantages. I am thinking a bunch of Terrain altering feats (Skill Powers and Practices) should come in at that point. (Engineering and Athletics skills)

I remember a bunch of that stuff. I guess we kind of let off on that fun when things got merged with the 5e forums. Anyway, I was thinking about this in terms of the HoML 'scale' thing. So, you have your heroic stuff, you slam the guy to the pavement. This is a limited use maneuver, but you can do it pretty often. It makes you bad-assed relative to normal guys, but its the stuff of those who 'go beyond' and you'd run into this kind of thing pretty often.

Maybe as a CAPSTONE you can do the next level badassery, and pound the guy into the pavement, and this becomes your Legendary version of this maneuver. So, now you toss people to the ground as the basic maneuver (at least people who aren't themselves Legendary) and your capstone is you completely banish someone, which then becomes a Mythic limited use move (maybe that's a bit extreme, maybe there is an intermediate level there and banish the Mythic capstone). There could be other progressions too. Maybe another maneuver lets you toss people, 3 meters, 100 meters, 10 kilometers, and the final capstone is 'they never come down'.

 

[Garthanos]

I remember a bunch of that stuff. I guess we kind of let off on that fun when things got merged with the 5e forums. Anyway, I was thinking about this in terms of the HoML 'scale' thing. So, you have your heroic stuff, you slam the guy to the pavement. This is a limited use maneuver, but you can do it pretty often. It makes you bad-assed relative to normal guys, but its the stuff of those who 'go beyond' and you'd run into this kind of thing pretty often.

Maybe as a CAPSTONE you can do the next level badassery, and pound the guy into the pavement, and this becomes your Legendary version of this maneuver. So, now you toss people to the ground as the basic maneuver (at least people who aren't themselves Legendary) and your capstone is you completely banish someone, which then becomes a Mythic limited use move (maybe that's a bit extreme, maybe there is an intermediate level there and banish the Mythic capstone). There could be other progressions too. Maybe another maneuver lets you toss people, 3 meters, 100 meters, 10 kilometers, and the final capstone is 'they never come down'.

I like the concept of powers explicitly scaling by tier in functional effect... They do in 4e sort of by way of taking different powers.

I am big on keeping things integrated closely with 4e but.

 

[Garthanos]

Well, to me Banishment really is EPIC whereas 'smashing the guy into the ground so hard he's stuck there' is pretty awesome, but not quite epic. Its a level of gonzo less. So I would say maybe MYTHS banish you to the center of the earth, LEGENDS cram you into the pavement, lol.

Of note perhaps the 5e banishment spell is not of that order either unless the subject has the ability to self return from such in about a minute.

One thing I have been recently thinking in terms of is alternate defeated conditions if you have successfully defeated the enemy with your banishment or knock em to hell power(or center of the earth) then the effect is basically permanent (subject to special undoing).

If you defeated them with a sleep spell they they are comatose forever *(with an ending condition) like sleeping beauty.

If you defeated them with your stone blood power they are turned entirely to stone (see also heavy ritual to remove)

Stuff like that.

 

[Argyle King]

Admittedly, I'm someone who once complained about 4E (and there still are things I don't like about the default assumptions of the system).

However there are also a lot of things it did "right."

A big one for me is encounter design. I enjoyed combat with a lot of monsters and moving pieces.

Encounter design is an area where I feel that 5E took a step backward.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Admittedly, I'm someone who once complained about 4E (and there still are things I don't like about the default assumptions of the system).

However there are also a lot of things it did "right."

A big one for me is encounter design. I enjoyed combat with a lot of monsters and moving pieces.

Encounter design is an area where I feel that 5E took a step backward.

Right, and OTOH I think 5e got certain things right as well, though it has been argued it was at the expense of other things. I feel like character options in 5e are generally easier to grasp in terms of their thematic relevancy as well as how they mechanically fit into your character build. 4e character builds became pretty baroque over time, and I think the E-classes were one attempt to combat that. I think it can be done better.

So, for instance, in my own Heroes of Myth and Legend 4e hack, there are only 'boons'. There aren't 'feats' and 'proficiencies' and themes and PPs and EDs and etc. etc. etc. Even items are folded into the boon concept (something 4e actually suggested, I just took it to an extreme). Powers become strictly consequences of boons. This tends to greatly simplify applying the mechanics to the characters. Granted there are still many many options, but there's a much smaller tendency to stack them together to create specific composite effects, which was the whole essence of 4e charops.

I also eliminated certain concepts pretty much completely, like multi-attacks. There are still AoEs of course, but there are various ways to avoid stacking up static damage bonuses (like mostly there aren't many and none of them ever stack). Overall TACTICS are still really relevant, but the whole 'recipe approach' to 'character build' is damped down a lot, which feels sort of like 5e (though 5e doesn't totally avoid it).

I mean, its good to have some synergies in the game, but they shouldn't out compete simply building in a thematic way, and the thematics should be pretty obvious!

 

[Aldarc]

I hope there comes a day, @AbdulAlhazred, when you share the entirety of your HoML project with us because it sounds way too intriguing to keep to yourself.

 

[Garthanos]

I hope there comes a day, @AbdulAlhazred, when you share the entirety of your HoML project with us because it sounds way too intriguing to keep to yourself.

Been telling him he needed to get this in a presentable enough form for easy feedback for quite a while... I think he had just picked a name when I first heard about it.

 

[Arcaneshield]

Running reign of winter in 4th edition myself.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Running reign of winter in 4th edition myself.

I don't know what it is, hehe.

 

[Arcaneshield]

Ahh sorry. Reign of Winter, a pathfinder adventure path. On this very website a fellow has converted the first three adventures.

PATHFINDER: Reign of Winter 4th Edition Conversion

PATHFINDER: Reign of Winter 4th Edition Conversion So, 4th Edition is dead, at least in the eyes of Wizard of the Coast. Everyone has their views of why this happened. Personally I think the biggest mistake WotC did was to end their cooperation with Paizo. Paizo had delivered some really great...

www.enworld.org